A Black historian and community activist, Price is the Rutgers Board of Governors Distinguished Service Professor of History at the Newark, N.J., campus. Price is most known for founding the Institute on Ethnicity, Culture and the Modern Experience 12 years ago “to plow the choppy, interesting waters of diversity,” he says.

Price also cofounded the Marion Thompson Wright Lecture Series in 1981, one of the nation’s oldest Black History Month conferences that has since attracted some of the world’s most notable scholars and historians to the region. (Local legend Marion Thompson Wright was one of the first professionally trained Black women historians in the country.)

“We launched the lecture series to re-center the history in Black History Month,” Price says. “It was our concern that it had become increasingly dedicated to entertainment and less to [its founding principles]—historical literacy.”

To ensure the continuation of the lecture series, “which over the last 10 years has drawn an increasingly diverse audience,” Price gift of $100,000 to the university established an endowment. He played a pivotal role in helping to recognize the 40th anniversary of the 1967 Newark summer riots and hosted the award-winning “The Once and Future Newark” documentary.

He sits on the New Jersey state steering committee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, responsible for reporting civil-rights issues in the Garden State. And last year, Price served on President Obama’s transition team, chairing the National Endowment for the Humanities.

See this article as it originally appeared in DiversityInc magazine.

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Question:
I’m a 21-year-old white male. Why does it seem like I must apologies (sic) for it? I’m not racist, sexist, nor feel any kind of discrimination towards anyone. I respect individuals based upon their character and merit. My parents and extended family share the same attitude and just a few generations ago my family were immigrants to this great country. Why does it seem that many people, like those behind this website and the hypersensitive groups at my University, make the assumption that I have some sort of advantage or I am given a better opportunity or even that I am prejudice because I’m a white male. I would not really notice race or feel uncomfortable around certain other races if I didn’t sense the animosity coming from the other direction. 

It’s hard out there for everyone, my peers and I will have the same opportunity to achieve success, no matter what race or sex or religion or however else you people categories individuals. It will be based upon our character and merit… that is unless this “diversity” stuff keeps holding all of us back. So I ask again, why does it seem like I must apologies for being a white male?

Answer:

If you have a passion in life and are sensitive enough to what is going on around you, patterns emerge to give you clarity. Today, I received your email; yesterday, I was speaking at a conference for the construction trade where I apologized to the mostly non-white crowd when I told them that they, the oppressed, were the ones who had to lead their companies out of oppressive behavior. And two days ago, I received an email from a fan who sent me my own words from this Ask the White Guy column I wrote years ago:

Some non-white people do “play the race card.” However, I’ll point out that white people “play the race card” every day of their lives. They may not know it, but they do. Such is the privilege of being white in this country. 

Also read: Ask the White Guy: Why Whites Can’t ‘Get Over’ Color 

The Legacy of Slavery & Racism

The legacy of slavery has benefited every white person in this country—directly and personally. In a very gross analogy, if you run a series of foot races over 300 years but prevent 13 percent of the participants from learning how to run for 180 years and then give them concrete sneakers for another 80 years—but allow them full access for 40 years—it will take the 13 percent quite a few races to be competitive because the other 87 percent advanced their skills by practice and repetition.

Read: Black History Month Facts & Figures

Life is not a foot race, but it is a fact that the average white person would not economically benefit from switching places with an average Black person (Black households average one-tenth the household wealth of white households. Click the image above to view additional factoids). If you believe all people are created equal, there has to be a reason for this—and there is: racism.

The core aspect of your ignorance is the assertion that you did not have “some sort of advantage” or that you were “given a better opportunity.” You are profoundly wrong in that statement.

The animosity you sense being directed at you is due to your behavior, which is shaped by profound lack of knowledge and perspective on how our current national situation has come to pass. You dismiss the very thing that shapes your entire life: white privilege. The fact that you think you can describe your life in absence of racial terms is the pinnacle of white privilege.

Being white means you never have to think about race; you never consider that your application to college will be treated differently; that the police officer stopping you isn’t out for anything more than how fast you were going; that your boss didn’t really mean to insult you to your core when he said “You’re so articulate” or dismiss your entire being by saying “I don’t care if you’re Black, Yellow, Brown, Green or Polka-Dot …”  Read 10 Things Never to Say to a Black Coworker for more.

Shifting Demographics Bring Awareness for Diversity

I am a baby boomer. My generation could get away with being sharp-elbowed in its ignorance of race, gender, orientation, disability and age discrimination and could maneuver just fine in society because America was far less diverse then and people outside the dominant group didn’t have enough political or economic power. Non-white people didn’t see codification of their human and civil rights until after the last baby boomer was born (1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act).

You, my sheltered friend, cannot maintain willful ignorance without detriment to yourself. Because of immigration reform in the mid-1960s, when non-white immigration quotas were lifted for the first time in American history, your generation is where our country crosses into profound diversity. Less than 50 percent of the children born in our country today are white, in contrast to 60 years ago when only one out of nine Americans was not white. 

Corporate Success Through Diversity Management

My publication exists because corporate America has enough of a thirst to understand how to profitably manage this diversity to keep us economically viable. You are an anachronism, and your attitude will sharply reduce your potential for career success in any well-managed company because progressive company leaders understand their fiduciary responsibility to manage diversity. This accountability is discussed explicitly in our Q&A with Ameren CEO Tom Voss:

You cannot have professional success if you think those around you are “hypersensitive.” Here’s a basic fact of life: Your feelings of discomfort are self-inflicted. YOUR behavior must change to lower the “hypersensitivity” that you think is not coming from yourself. It is your responsibility—and your repercussion—that if you continue on your current track, you will simply be sidelined in any organization you find on our DiversityInc Top 50 list.

As it is your responsibility, I will leave it to you to read up on the three-fifths rule in our Constitution, the Civil War, the Jim Crow era, the civil-rights era, and things such as the Civil Rights Act, Voting Rights Act, Community Reinvestment Act of 1977 and the Americans with Disabilities Act.

I will leave it to you to learn about the prison industrial complex, which, fueled by the 41-year-old “war on drugs,” has resulted in our country imprisoning seven times the per capita average of the rest of the world. Fifty-eight percent of American prisoners are Black and Latino; think about the disproportional impact of this statistic on the families of the innocent.

I’ll leave it to you to read the Pew Research report showing that because of the overt racial targeting of Black and Latino households in the subprime crisis, Black and Latino household wealth (already behind that of white households before the crisis) is now 1/20th and 1/18th the wealth of white households, respectively. I will leave it up to you to learn about the abject failure of public schools that serve the poor. I will leave it to you to discover Frederick Douglass’ wisdom. I will leave it to you to read “The New Jim Crow” by Michelle Alexander.

You are grossly insulting and express profound ignorance when you say that everyone has the “same opportunity” and that “character and merit” are the only determining factors. It’s ironic—you don’t have to apologize for being white, but if you develop an understanding of why you feel that dissonance in your soul, you will gain a powerful advantage as you will be able to build allies and broaden your world.

Luke Visconti’s Ask the White Guy column is a top draw on DiversityInc.com. Visconti, the founder and CEO of DiversityInc, is a nationally recognized leader in diversity management. In his popular column, readers who ask Visconti tough questions about race/culture, religion, gender, sexual orientation, disability and age can expect smart, direct and disarmingly frank answers.

The post Ask the White Guy: ‘I’m a Young White Male; What Do I Have to Apologies (sic) For?’ appeared first on DiversityInc.

“My dad was easily the greatest human being I’ve ever known because of his tremendous compassion for people, especially the underdogs. This influenced every aspect of my life,” says Brown, who is a partner in Greenbaum Rowe Smith & Davis’ legal department and chair of the White Collar Defense & Corporate and International Human Rights Compliance Group.

Brown was raised in what he calls a “Jim Crow housing project,” the Booker T. Washington complex. After a childhood watching his father organize protest marches and fight David vs. Goliath legal battles, he wanted to be anything but a lawyer.

He attended Columbia University, where the late 1960s student protests were getting under way, and he became an activist in the Black student movement. As a result of charges stemming from a confrontation between police officers and protesters, Brown “became the football in an important legal battle.” He wasn’t convicted and was never indicted, and the legal experience made him decide to become an attorney. “I realized that lawyers are the core who can challenge the legal system,” he recalls.

Diversity and Inclusion: Working Within the Law for Change

He went to law school at the University of California, Berkeley, where activism and legal knowledge went hand in hand. As he launched his legal career, the people he’d met through his father globally made him want to explore human-rights ramifications in and outside of the United States.

“It’s hard to be around a person like my father and not realize how important this is,” he says. “I grew up in the movement. I met my first aboriginal people who came to the U.S. in 1956 … I saw the Ghandists around Dr. King and the strategic value of non-violence. There’s always been an aspect of the civil-rights movement that had an eye toward all people who were oppressed.”

Read: What Dr. King Really Meant: The Obligation That Benefits Everyone

This “natural progression, intellectually and personally,” led him to an astounding career, domestically and globally. In the United States, where he’s specialized in white-collar crimes and corporate compliance, he’s appeared in high-profile trials, including the trial of former Labor Secretary Raymond J. Donovan and the successful eight-year defense of senior executives of a large corporation charged with environmental violations. Globally, he’s conducted investigations in Kenya, East Africa, El Salvador, the Cayman Islands, Switzerland, the Bahamas, Colombia and Sierra Leone.

What jump-started his work for human rights was being asked to be an anchor on Court TV, reporting on war-crime violations. He has continued his legal/journalism career, hosting the Emmy Award–winning New Jersey Network Program “Due Process” and often serving as a legal analyst for broadcast programs. He has also taught international criminal law at Seton Hall University, has been a prolific public speaker and has received numerous awards, including the Award of Excellence from the Thurgood Marshall College Fund, the Distinguished International Award from the National Council of Women in the USA and the Van Y. Clinton Award for “excellence as a tireless advocate for just causes” from the Garden State Bar Association.

His trial experience has included criminal cases, serious violations of international humanitarian law, RICO violations, environmental pollution and internal investigations for public and corporate clients.

Crimes Against Women

Brown and his wife, Wanda, who is also an attorney, operate the International Justice Project, which fights human-rights abuses. “We focus on crimes against women. If you sexually assault women, you demoralize them and destroy the family union,” he says. “Women are the key to economic life. The deliberate attempt to destroy women is a big part of how the law looks in many countries.”

As a result of these experiences, Brown has pioneered the development of a new practice area, working with corporations to make them aware of the risk-assessment and business benefits of their involvement with human-rights causes.

“A C-level person says, ‘Wait a minute. Think of the short-, mid- and long-term requirements of regulations and how we’re perceived at a time when businesses are required to act as sovereign entities.’ There is a profound transformation now culminating in a way that affects businesses,” he says, and their efforts toward diversity and inclusion.

Read: Women’s History Month Facts and Why Is Global Diversity So Difficult?

The post Why This Attorney Makes Global Human Rights His Personal Challenge appeared first on DiversityInc.

“When Colin Powell, one of our Freedom Award recipients, came through the museum, he said he and his wife could hardly make it … because they almost broke down in tears,” recalls Robertson. “It causes you to reflect on how far we’ve come … and the tremendous amount of pain, suffering and death that it took to get us where we are today.”

For many, discovering Black history becomes a personal journey toward understanding one’s self and society. It causes profound introspection—and this experience can occur in hundreds of museums across the nation, from Washington, D.C., to Detroit to downtown Los Angeles.

“Instead of Black History being recognized one month out of the year, it’s something that needs to be recognized throughout the year,” says Robertson. “And I think [Black history museums] are particularly significant because you must remember that so much African-American history, so much history about the civil-rights movement and the accomplishments of African Americans, are not studied in our schools.”

Not only are individuals taking tours through Black history museums for the educational experience, corporations are getting involved as well because Blacks, Latinos and Asians make up nearly 34 percent of the nation’s work force, according to the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. And corporate leaders need to be more knowledgeable about and sensitive to the cultural backgrounds of employees to recruit, develop and retain all talent.

As a result, organizations, including several on The DiversityInc Top 50 Companies for Diversity list, are financially supporting these institutions, sitting on their boards and utilizing their facilities for diversity training and annual meetings to take diversity management to the next level. To read this story in the DiversityInc February 2010 digital magazine, click here.

National Civil Rights Museum

The National Civil Rights Museum chronicles major episodes of the civil-rights movement, from the early 1600s when African slaves first arrived, to the Civil War, to the formation of Black organizations, to the passage of the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments and, later, the Voting Rights Act and integration of Little Rock High School. Attracting about 200,000 visitors annually, including Nelson Mandela, Desmond Tutu and former President Bill Clinton, the Lorraine Motel was originally owned by a Black couple and was “one of the only places in the ’60s where African Americans could go and not have a problem checking in,” says Robertson. Two of the most popular exhibits include the interactive Montgomery bus, in which visitors are ordered to “move to the back of the bus,” and Room 306, known as the “King” room.

“You’re vicariously transported back in time when you’re standing looking into the room where Dr. King spent his last day,” says Robertson. Listening to gospel singer Mahalia Jackson’s “Precious Lord,” Dr. King’s favorite song, visitors look out the motel-room window to the boarding room across the street where James Earl Ray’s fatal shot was fired.

“It should be the law that you must pass through the National Civil Rights Museum before you’re allowed to vote,” writes a 42-year-old white man who had returned from the site. Having toured the museum and stood in Room 306, where the Dr. King spent his last day, he continues: “I was not prepared for this experience. I was not prepared to see a Klan outfit. I was not prepared to break down in tears … nor was I prepared for the anger that rushed through me.”

The National Civil Rights Museum also attracts corporations such as Minneapolis-based Best Buy. For several years, the company has anchored its three-day transformational leadership-development program in the museum, inviting thousands of its retail managers to Memphis. (The program has recently been expanded to all employees.) After touring the museum, the retail giant holds a series of employee workshops and discussions. The company reports that programs such as this add to its bottom line by instilling cultural awareness and tangible diversity leadership skills into its work force.

Other retailers, such as JCPenney (No. 35 in the DiversityInc Top 50), are involved in a giving program that allows consumers to shop online, and a portion of each purchase is donated to their favorite cause, including the National Civil Rights Museum.

Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History

In Detroit’s cultural district, the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History offers the largest Black history museum in the world. For the past 45 years, it has provided learning experiences, exhibitions, programs and events, such as the Africa World Festival, that explore Black history and culture. The 120,000-square-foot museum, which attracts about 200,000 people each year and includes more than 30,000 artifacts and documents, is located in one of five cities considered “gateways to freedom” for tens of thousands of slaves seeking refuge in Canada, making it an appropriate home to the Blanche Coggin Underground Railroad Collection and Harriet Tubman Museum Collection. While numerous temporary exhibits, ranging from the influence Joe Louis had on America to the celebration of Black women’s hats and head coverings, are on display, the core, permanent exhibit is “And Still We Rise.” This interactive, multi-level journey begins in prehistoric Africa, moves to the middle passage of a slave ship and then goes to present-day Detroit.

“The reaction that we often get is that it’s overwhelming,” says President and CEO Juanita Moore. “When people go through the slave ship, they’re moved to tears. Sometimes people have to come out of the exhibition space to gather themselves. It’s a moment of great reflection. It’s a place to pay homage. But it’s also an opportunity to get introspective and learn.”

Currently, the museum’s curators are collaborating on a project about the deindustrialization of Detroit and its impact on the Black community with Michigan State and about 30 corporations. And over the years, the financial support of corporations and foundations such as Ford (No. 47 in the DiversityInc Top 50), AT&T (No. 4), Target (No. 44), PricewaterhouseCoopers (No. 3) and others have helped the Wright Museum continue to enhance its educational and historical experience.

“History feeds the spirit and the soul,” says Moore. “You understand that bad things have happened before and it passes.”

National Underground Railroad Freedom Museum

The National Underground Railroad Freedom Center, based in Cincinnati where the Underground Railroad operated extensively during the Civil War, is dedicated to telling the story of the struggle for freedom, both historically and in modern times. The museum’s narratives focus on the antebellum activity, in which enslaved Blacks fled to freedom and were often helped by sympathetic whites who were “conductors” along the Underground Railroad’s informal network of escape routes and safe houses.

“The Ohio river was a major commercial artery as well as a crossing point for slaves,” says Chief Communications Officer Paul Bernish. Bordering on a slave state, “the same issues that divided the nation at that time divided Cincinnati. We had abolitionists and pro-slavery people living right next to each other. You had free slaves working and you had escaping slaves hiding … so from a historic standpoint, this is an ideal location for the museum.”

The 158,000-square-foot, three-pavilion museum’s largest exhibit, “From Slavery to Freedom,” covers the nation’s history of slavery of all people from the 1500s to the Civil War and includes the economic, social and cultural underpinnings of slavery. The most popular exhibit is a two-story slave warehouse, originally built in Mason County, Ky., that held upwards of 70 people.

“For most that come here, it’s a stark and dramatic confrontation with the history of slavery in America,” says Bernish.

One of the Freedom Center’s biggest benefactors, he says, has been Cincinnati-based Procter & Gamble (No. 25 in the DiversityInc Top 50). With a work force that’s 11 percent Black and mirrors its customer base, the consumer-products giant has not only been a corporate foundation donor, it regularly holds sales meetings at the facility and “often brings in suppliers to experience the museum,” adds Bernish.

America I AM: The African American Imprint

California Science Center in Los Angeles is home to the West Coast debut of America I AM: The African American Imprint. This 12-gallery traveling exhibition, presented by broadcaster and past DiversityInc event keynote speaker Tavis Smiley and sponsored by Walmart, includes numerous historical artifacts, including:

• The Door of No Return, from the Cape Coast Castle in Ghana, in which enslaved Africans passed through to board ships to North America
• Alex Haley’s typewriter, used to write “Roots”
• Malcolm X’s journal and Quran
• Frederick Douglass’s clothing and letter from Lincoln, which enabled him to recruit Black soldiers

America I AM: The African American Imprint encourages all people to connect in a meaningful way with the foundations of democracy, cultural diversity, exploration and free enterprise, which began when the first Africans arrived in Jamestown,” says Smiley. “By telling the stories of the events of the past, we can help the leaders of the future set the stage for active participation in the democratic process for years to come.

Want to Learn More?

• Civil Rights Memorial Center Located in historic Montgomery, Ala., across the street from Southern Poverty Law Center, the center offers images of iconic civil-rights leaders, a 56-seat theater and the Wall of Tolerance, where visitors pledge to take a stand against hate by entering their names on an interactive wall.
• DuSable Museum of African American History This Chicago museum has been dedicated to the collection, preservation, interpretation and dissemination of the history and culture of Africans and Black Americans for more than 46 years.
• Hampton University Museum & Archives Located on the grounds of Hampton University campus, the museum, which was founded in 1868, is one of the oldest in Virginia. It features more than 9,000 objects, including African American fine arts, traditional African, Native American, Native Hawaiian, Pacific Island, and Asian art.
• Idaho Black History Museum Housed in St. Paul Baptist Church in Boise, one of the oldest buildings constructed by Idaho Blacks, the museum presents exhibits and educational outreach, including workshops, literacy programs and music.
• International Civil Rights Center & Museum This newly opened exhibit and teaching facility, located in the historic F.W. Woolworth building in Greensboro, N.C., where four N.C. A&T freshmen set off a nonviolent sit-in 50 years ago, is a recreation of what the segregated South was like during the civil-rights movement.
• Museum of African American History in Boston Based in an African Meeting House, the oldest U.S. church built by free Blacks in 1806 has recently been restored, thanks largely to sponsorship from Walmart Foundation. It features stories of Blacks from 1638 through the Civil War.
• NAACP Interactive Historical Timeline Funded through a $500,000 grant from the Verizon Foundation, this newly launched online learning tool from the NAACP offers major milestones in Black history, biographies of legendary leaders in Black history and other educational resources. Verizon Communications is No. 22 in the 2011 DiversityInc Top 50.
• Smithsonian National Museum of African American History & Culture Although the museum is currently being built on the National Mall in the District of Columbia, not far from what were once slave markets called “Robey’s Den,” a gallery can be found on the second floor of the National Museum of American History. And thanks to a $1-million grant of technology and expertise from IBM (No. 7), you can take a virtual tour at nmaahc.si.edu.

VIDEOS

1. DiversityInc CEO Luke Visconti and National Civil Rights Museum President Beverly Robertson
2. Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History
3. African American History Museum in Boston
4. Smithsonian National Museum of African American History series
5. National Underground Railroad Freedom Center

COLLATERAL MATERIAL

• PricewaterhouseCoopers: 10 Minutes on Managing Diversity
• PricewaterhouseCoopers: Confronting the Issue brochure
• PricewaterhouseCoopers: Impact fact sheet
• PricewaterhouseCoopers: Why Diversity Why Now
• WellPoint’s Black History Month poster

The post Discover America’s Black History appeared first on DiversityInc.

Her book, “The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration,” is about Blacks’ emigration from the South between 1915 and 1970 to escape a “mercurial” caste system of color that threatened violence daily. “An African American was lynched every four days,” Wilkerson said. “That was the price of maintaining the caste system.”

Wilkerson talked about how the migration of Blacks was much like the migration of Europeans, Asians and Latinos to the U.S. — the journey was about freedom to express and to build on their talents.

“It is about the very thing that propelled all of our forebears, one way or another — across the Atlantic in steerage, or across the Rio Grande, or across the Pacific Ocean. It’s the very thing that binds all of us together. We all have so much more in common that we’ve been led to believe, because, ultimately, somebody in all of our backgrounds had to do what the people in this book did,” Wilkerson says.

“That is really what diversity is all about, building on innate talents that are within us all and making the most of everybody who’s in our organizations,” she says. “The cost of holding people down and not allowing them to flourish hurts the world.”

For more information about upcoming diversity events, please visit www.DiversityInc.com/events.

The post Lynching, Oppression, Lost Potential: Why Blacks Fled the South appeared first on DiversityInc.

Luke Visconti’s Ask the White Guy column is a top draw on DiversityInc.com. Visconti, the founder and CEO of DiversityInc, is a nationally recognized leader in diversity management. In his popular column, readers who ask Visconti tough questions about race/culture, religion, gender, sexual orientation, disability and age can expect smart, direct and disarmingly frank answers.

The New York Times ran a front-page article about the 2006 Federal Reserve Board meetings—transcripts of the meetings are released after a standard five-year delay. In short, the board was unconcerned about the housing bubble, even though they discussed how the then-howling housing market was starting to teeter. As The Times put it, “The problem was not a lack of information; it was a lack of comprehension, born in part of their deep confidence in economic forecasting models that turned out to be broken.”

Broken Models

“Models” are broken on a regular basis, usually when one or more parameters of the model exceed the experts’ opinions on its range. For example, the Jim Crow enforcement arm, so aptly characterized by Bull Connor, could not have been expected to successfully put down Dr. King’s movement because nonviolence was not anticipated by violent, hate-filled men. Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy didn’t take the civil-rights movement all that seriously—but President Johnson met with Dr. King as the publicity became unacceptable when photographs of “Bloody Sunday” appeared in newspapers around the world in 1965. It’s not a stretch to link the civil-rights era to the broken economic model the Federal Reserve Board was using. The Fed Board itself had (and still has) an astounding lack of diversity coupled with, in my observation, a negligible diversity-management structure.

In 2006, The Federal Reserve Board of Governors  and Federal Reserve Bank presidents were fourteen white men and four white woman.  In 2011, some of the people were  different, but the demographics are basically the same: A stunning lack of diversity.

Also in 2006, I had a speaking engagement at an American Bar Association function. After my talk, a woman came out of the crowd and told me that she had a “diversity” story for me. She asked me if I had ever been in a Philadelphia row house. I told her I had. She went on to tell me that people were refinancing their row houses for $250,000. I was astonished, and she said, “That’s right, they’re $80,000 row houses; they’ll always be $80,000 row houses. Something’s wrong.” What was wrong was that the market demand for collateralized mortgage bundles had outpaced the normal housing market, so one had to be created if the banks were to continue to make money from this cycle. The mortgage-broker predators descended on lower-middle-class people—diverse and financially unsophisticated—and sold them on a deal that was too good to be true: Take “equity” out of your house to go on vacation, buy a boat, finance college for your kids, whatever, and never have to worry, because the housing market will continue to zoom up forever.

Frankly, I didn’t know what to do with the story. Like the Federal Reserve Board of 2006, I would have done a few things differently from the perspective of retrospection.

Business Case for Diversity

But what if the Federal Reserve Board members had those kinds of feelers out in the market? What if they were supported by a diversity-management structure, chairing their diversity-council meetings, meeting regularly with employee-resource groups and mentoring people who were not from their background? What if they organized and personally involved themselves with philanthropic endeavors that didn’t serve their own kind?

Could we have avoided this horrible recession, which has put more than 18 percent of our population into unemployment or underemployment for more than three years (U-6 unemployment)? Could we have avoided more than doubling the divide between Black and Latino household wealth (now at one-twentieth and one-eighteenth of white household wealth, respectively, according to Pew Research)?

My two visits to two Federal Reserve banks tell me that their current culture would exclude that possibility. Like most federal agencies, the Fed is very formal, starchy and full of pomp and circumstance. It’s a culture that reveres its self-created hierarchy, a queasy blast from the past. It’s not all bad—in my opinion, we do not yet fully appreciate the action of the Fed Board once the crisis unfolded. I believe that they, along with President Obama, prevented the entire world’s economy from falling into the abyss and creating a depression that would have made 1933 look like a walk in the park.

The board members are good Americans, serving our country as best they can, but their lack of diversity management and stunning lack of results sharply limits their ability to perceive reality—and it limits their ability to anticipate when the next model is broken.

But it’s not just the federal government. Half of the companies on the 1997 Fortune 500 list were not in existence by 2007, in many cases overcome by circumstances that exceeded their models. Does your organization have the vulnerability of a limited perspective at the top? Now you have yet another business case for diversity. 

For more on diversity management best practices, read Why White Men Must Attend Diversity Training and  How Effective Diversity Management Drives Profit.

The post Did the Fed’s Stunning Lack of Diversity Cause the Housing Crisis? appeared first on DiversityInc.

Last year, on Martin Luther King Day, more than 6,400 Kaiser Permanente employees and physicians worked on projects in close to 100 community sites across the country, serving approximately 17,925 people. Captured in this video, Kaiser Permanente volunteers provided valuable services throughout the nation in honor of Dr. King’s legacy.

On Martin Luther King Day this year, as in years past, Kaiser Permanente’s Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, George Halvorson, along with Bernard Tyson, president and chief operating officer, and Jack Cochran, MD, executive director of The Permanente Federation, are distributing hundreds of coats to people in need at City Team Ministries in Oakland. City Team Ministries provides hot meals and safe shelter to Oakland’s underserved populations. The organization also provides medical care to the needy, operates a recovery program, provides clothing for disadvantaged families, and offers recreational and spiritual programs for children.

“For more than 65 years, Kaiser Permanente has had a rich history of service that is at the heart of our mission to improve the lives of our members and the communities we serve,” said Raymond J. Baxter, PhD, senior vice president, Community Benefit, Research and Healthy Policy for Kaiser Permanente. “Today, one of the biggest challenges facing the nation is the economy. By committing to a day of service, Kaiser Permanente will help serve thousands of people who are in need. The most important part of this work is remembering to serve our communities throughout the year, not just on this National Day of Service.”

In addition to the coat drive in Oakland, Kaiser Permanente employees and physicians will volunteer at service sites in communities throughout the nine states, and the District of Columbia, that Kaiser Permanente serves. Among the projects are:

.    In San Jose, Calif., Kaiser Permanente volunteers will help Ocala Middle School create a new and improved school culture with anti-bullying, health and fitness messages. Volunteers will work on various projects including interior painting in the locker rooms, cafeteria and library, exterior painting of the school building, painting a mural, building new planter beds in the school’s educational garden, and planting native California plants around the school.

.    In Oregon, Kaiser Permanente employees are teaming up with the Oregon Food Bank to sort and repackage food. The Oregon Food Bank recovers food from farmers, manufacturers, wholesalers, retailers, individuals and government sources and distributes it to 20 regional food banks across Oregon.

.    Kaiser Permanente employees in Colorado are working with the PROJECT for Commission on Urgent Relief and Equipment to sort medical supplies, paint warehouse walls, build shelving and organize biomedical equipment.

.    In Southern California, Kaiser Permanente employees are providing health screenings during the San Gabriel Valley NAACP’s Martin Luther King Day Informational Fair held at the West Covina Civic Center.

.    Kaiser Permanente employees in Hawaii are teaming up with Ka Hale A Ke Ola Homeless Resource Centers, Inc., a homeless shelter founded in 1986, to paint the exterior of the emergency and transitional shelters and housing units throughout the center’s 5-acre campus.

.    In Virginia, Maryland and Washington, D.C., Kaiser Permanente employees in partnership with the United Way of the National Capital Area, are teaming up to provide free health screenings.

.    In Ohio, Kaiser Permanente employees are partnering with Haven of Rest, an organization dedicated to providing palliative care, caregiver support and bereavement services throughout Northern Ohio. Volunteers will sort donated clothing and help serve meals to shelter residents.

.    Employees in Georgia are teaming up with Hosea Feed The Hungry and Homeless, founded in 1971. An international aid organization, Hosea Feed The Hungry and Homeless aims to rescue, restore and re-stabilize at-risk and homeless individuals and families so they can thrive and become self-sufficient. Kaiser Permanente employees will be hosting a dinner at the Georgia International Convention Center.

For more about Kaiser Permanente’s efforts in the community year-round, visit: kp.org/communitybenefit.     

About Kaiser Permanente

Kaiser Permanente is committed to helping shape the future of health care. We are recognized as one of America’s leading health care providers and not-for-profit health plans. Founded in 1945, our mission is to provide high-quality, affordable health care services and to improve the health of our members and the communities we serve. We serve approximately 8.9 million members in nine states and the District of Columbia. Care for members and patients is focused on their total health and guided by their personal physicians, specialists and team of caregivers. Our expert and caring medical teams are empowered and supported by industry-leading technology advances and tools for health promotion, disease prevention, state-of-the art care delivery and world-class chronic disease management. Kaiser Permanente is dedicated to care innovations, clinical research, health education and the support of community health. For more information, go to: www.kp.org/newscenter.

The post Thousands of Kaiser Permanente Employees and Physicians to Honor Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. appeared first on DiversityInc.

Brown works in the litigation department at Greenbaum, Rowe, Smith and Davis and is chair of its White Collar Defense & Corporate Compliance Practice Group. He is an expert on global human rights. Brown will speak at DiversityInc’s April 24–25 diversity conference, Managing the Global War for Talent.           

It was the first time a secular speech gave me chills. The details of the precise Manhattan venue and my age (13 to 15) have faded. I do, however, recall the context.

I was a child of what we called the “movement.” My dad had taken me to hear Dr. King speak in the context of the struggle with the conservative leadership of the NAACP. (Although my dad was president of Jersey City NAACP, he was not on their side in this fight. In fact, when a national news magazine asked him on the eve of the 1963 March on Washington if he thought NAACP Executive Director Roy Wilkins was asleep at the switch, he had replied, “Hell, Roy doesn’t even know where the switch is.”)

I don’t recall every minute of King’s speech except the talismanic words and phrases … “justice … freedom … the redemptive power of unmerited suffering”—and the chills. I did know that this was an argument over direct action and protest in the movement, an argument on which King prevailed.

For more on the power of words as tools to combat hateful speech, read “NBA Star John Amaechi: Hate Speech Goes Beyond N- and F-Words.” For more on dispelling stereotypes, read “‘Blacks Should Not Be Satisfied With Food Stamps’: The Danger of Stereotypes.”

Years later, however, I trailed silently behind my dad the night before the march when the “old heads,” led by the eminence grise and father of the march, A. Phillip Randolph, prevailed upon John Lewis and others not to denounce King as irrelevant and the march itself as “too little too late.” Since that August, my stomach has turned as the forces of reaction and revision have used the phrase “content of their character” to convert King into a prophet of post-racialism.

But it’s not a parlor game to say that King believed in “human rights.” He was championing the subject just 20 years after the concept was born and long before it gained its current traction. Much of the conversation about his “Mountaintop” speech at Mason Temple the night before his assassination has missed this point and mistakenly emphasized his Mosaic premonition of death.

King used the Mason Temple moment to defend himself against those who charged him with sullying the banner of civil rights by defending underpaid garbage workers in Memphis. His response was that he was living in a time of the “Human Rights Revolution” and he would support people from Johannesburg to Memphis who were “rising” to demand freedom and justice.

His text that night was the parable of the Good Samaritan. He argued that the road from Jerusalem to Jericho was “really conducive” to ambushing because of the height of the bordering dunes. He emphasized that in leaving the road to offer rescue, the Samaritan was responding to the call of a “man of another race,” thereby projecting the “I” into “thou” and taking risks for his “brother.”

“If I do not stop to help with man, what will happen to him? … If I do not stop to help the sanitation workers, what will happen to them?”

In this century, my wife, Wanda, and I journeyed from teaching in Egypt to take up the implicit challenge in King’s speech and walk that road. The dunes are still there; there is still a risk in leaving that road. The decision to venture out is no less burdened with complex considerations of gender, race, class, religion and ethnicity than it ever was before. And when I think of my dad, King, John Lewis and thousands of others, from Jersey City to Darfur, who choose to take that chance and leave the road and risk the dunes, sometimes with eloquence and sometimes in silence—I still get those chills.

Read other accounts on Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.:

Before MLK, None of My Accomplishments Would Have Been Possible
DiversityInc’s Denyse Leslie, senior vice president of consulting, draws a parallel between Dr. King’s firsts (first arrest, first book published, first Black man to win the Nobel Peace Prize) and the firsts of Blacks still alive (or recently deceased) as they live out Dr. King’s vision.

Civil-Rights Progress: Helping LGBT Youth
GLSEN’s Executive Director Dr. Eliza Byard notes how Dr. King’s message that Black people would eventually reach the promised land is a reminder today that progress, no matter how slow, is crucial.

How Has Dr. King’s Legacy Changed Lives?
While Hurricane Irene hit during the Martin Luther King Jr. National Memorial dedication, R. Fenimore Fisher reflected on how Dr. King’s actions changed the law that changed society.

What Dr. King Really Meant: The Obligation That Benefits Everyone
Why is the business case for diversity a reality and not just a theory? It is directly due to Dr. King and the civil-rights era, explains DiversityInc CEO Luke Visconti.

Watch Raymond Brown speak on human rights and segregation. For more on Black History and the civil-rights movement, read “Discover America′s Black History” and “Re-Centering the History in Black History.”

The post Taking Risks for Your Brothers: The Power of Dr. King’s Words appeared first on DiversityInc.

By Dr. Eliza Byard

Dr. Byard is the executive director of GLSEN, the Gay, Lesbian & Straight Education Network.

As we head into this long weekend in honor of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the family of Robert Champion is mourning his death and suing those they hold responsible for their wrongful loss. Champion was a drum major for Florida A&M’s Marching 100, who died in the wake of a hazing ritual on a band bus on Nov. 19, 2011. Friends and family say Champion was gay, and GLSEN’s great partner the National Black Justice Coalition (NBJC) is calling for a U.S. Justice Department investigation into whether his death was a hate crime. The emergence of this story into national prominence on the eve of Dr. King’s holiday seems tragically inevitable—although troublingly overdue.

Dr. King’s very last sermon, delivered in 1968, was a meditation on “the Drum Major Instinct”: a desire to lead, to be first, to be praised and to make a mark on the world. (You can find the full text of this sermon here [along with the audio file, if you really want to give yourself goose bumps].) Dr. King argued that we all have this instinct, which can be rightfully condemned when it leads to destructive, selfish behavior. But it is a natural instinct, Dr. King went on, present in everyone, that can be the source of great change and true greatness when it is harnessed through service and love. Contemplating his own legacy in the sermon’s conclusion (eerily close to the hour of his own assassination), Dr. King said, “If you want to say that I was a drum major, say that I was a drum major for justice. Say that I was a drum major for peace. I was a drum major for righteousness.”

Robert Champion was, in fact, an actual drum major in one of the celebrated marching bands of the HBCUs (historically Black colleges and universities). Friends and family say that he was a crusader against the hazing that is such a central and dangerous part of the marching-band experience at HBCUs. His own success as a leader within the band was a testament to the possibility that one could rise through the ranks without submitting to the degrading rituals invented by band leaders to test emerging candidates. Champion was, apparently, in line to become head drum major for the Marching 100. And he was gay. Today, a painful set of inquiries seek to determine what role each of these factors played in the intense beating that led to his death.

Champion sought to be a leader and to lead the way to a more just system within the band by resisting violent and artificial rituals. A drum major for justice. A central purpose of our work at GLSEN from the beginning—and a pillar of our current strategic plan—is to support emerging student leaders and to ensure that leadership opportunities throughout the K–12 school years are open to all students, whether they are straight, gay, lesbian, bisexual and/or transgender. And we seek to break the cycle of learned hatred and violence directed at LGBT people that some of Champion’s fellow students may have channeled into the beating that led to his death. Each year, we meet and support a new group of emerging Drum Majors for Justice who decide to channel their instinct into GSA leadership or other acts of brave service, some as simple as staying silent on the Day of Silence or speaking out during Ally Week or expressing their aspirations for a better future through artistic expression during No Name-Calling Week.

Read “Safe LGBT Spaces: What Schools Can Learn From Employee-Resource Groups” for more on increasing inclusion for LGBT in schools.

Before you head off for the weekend, take a moment to sign NBJC’s petition (at www.nbjc.org) so that the facts regarding Robert Champion’s will come to light. And take a moment to reflect on the work and leadership of the remarkable students whose efforts we support, and whose work is going to change the world.

Read other accounts on Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.:

Before MLK, None of My Accomplishments Would Have Been Possible
DiversityInc’s Denyse Leslie, senior vice president of consulting, draws a parallel between Dr. King’s firsts (first arrest, first book published, first Black man to win the Nobel Peace Prize) and the firsts of Blacks still alive (or recently deceased) as they live out Dr. King’s vision.

Taking Risks for Your Brothers: The Power of Martin Luther King Jr.’s Words
Human-rights activist Raymond Brown learned about the need for humanity from Dr. King.

How Has Dr. King’s Legacy Changed Lives?
While Hurricane Irene hit during the Martin Luther King Jr. National Memorial dedication, R. Fenimore Fisher reflected on how Dr. King’s actions changed the law that changed society.

What Dr. King Really Meant: The Obligation That Benefits Everyone
Why is the business case for diversity a reality and not just a theory? It is directly due to Dr. King and the civil-rights era, explains DiversityInc CEO Luke Visconti.

For more on Black History and the civil-rights movement, read “Discover America′s Black History” and “Re-Centering the History in Black History.”

The post Civil-Rights Progress: Helping LGBT Youth appeared first on DiversityInc.